As I recall, that was a lawsuit to recover health care costs, not an inquisition to arrest tobacco company executives. The fact that tobacco companies had misled the public for decades was used as part of the lawsuit, but I don’t recall any attempts to press charges against execs.
As a card carrying member of the vast right wing conspiracy, I reserve the right to poke fun at the President whenever I feel like it. And be reasonable: his assertion that he only finds out about bad things his administration does from the paper like the rest of us deserves the derision the Washington press corps heaped on it. If it’s fair for comedians to spend years harping on how Bush DIDN’T read the paper, I can make fun of Obama for being overly reliant on it rather than on information flowing through his administration properly so that he’s informed of deficiencies before the media is.
I rather doubt anyone prepares a daily “Stupid Things Your Underlings Did” report.
You’ve said you’re a manager. How many times do you find out what an employee did before the shit hits the fan?
Or do you find out when you read the customer comment cards or the district manager informs you?
Since I was a store manager, I’d better know what’s going on, and if it’s serious enough, my boss better find out before someone else tells him. Yes, customers sometimes go straight to the area manager or even higher, which is why sometimes I might not know of a specific complaint. And likewise, sometimes people go straight to the media rather than through the chain of command. The problem with the Obama administration though is that in not one single case did that happen. In all cases the issue was known at levels higher up, but for some reason stopped before getting TOO high up. Communication broke down somewhere. Sometimes right before the President. White House aides knew in a couple of cases but decided not to tell the President.
To cite one example that happened to me, a guy ordered a pizza, we got to his house, and he wanted to pay with starter checks. This guy was certainly old enough to know that start checks aren’t accepted by most businesses. Generally, they are only accepted for things that you don’t get until after payment clears. So you can use them to pay bills and such, but you won’t generally be allowed to take home an actual product in exchange for a starter check. He had a fit, and since the driver had already handed him the pizzas, he refused to give them back. “take the starter check or nothing”. I called my manager(I wasn’t a store manager at the time) and he said, “call the cops.” Okey dokey. I did, and the cops made him give the pizzas back. Due to the seriousness of the incident, the area manager was informed. Which was a really good thing, because the dude was a columnist for a local paper and wrote about the experience. I don’t know if he informed HIS boss(probably not, since the paper had very local scope and there was no internet then to spread such stories). But the chain of command functioned. In the executive branch, it generally doesn’t, and that’s not just this administration. Corporate chains of command are designed to insure accountability. In government, they are designed to avoid it. “I didn’t know” is the kind of thing that will result in hell to pay in the corporate world. Someone failed to do their job and didn’t bother to inform the people that needed to know. In the government, that’s just business as usual.
But what is unusual about this President is how he goes to that same well even though no one believes it for a second. Most Presidents at least give the “the buck stops here” speech as a lead-in before explaining why it’s actually someone else’s fault. Obama goes straight to “I didn’t know” as if that’a a defense. So I’m going to continue to make fun of it.
What gives you the idea that the Obama administration is liberal?
What’s wrong, just not care enough to find out?
Or is this just more of the usual shit that Obama is personally responsible for knowing what every single federal employee has done during the previous day?
You say “all cases” as if you’d know. It’s a bullshit and unknowable claim. There’s no way you could know about all the problems that didn’t make the papers, only the ones most heavily publicized in the news you read, which will be the ones that are most news worthy and most problematic for the president.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy - there will always be some problems, and the president won’t know about all of them before the media does, so you can claim he always deflects blame. You could do this for any executive, since there will always be some problems that the top misses, and the bigger the organization, the bigger the problems will be.
He’s taken responsibility for multiple mistakes, but that doesn’t fit your narrative, so you ignore it.
The President is responsible for ongoing problems that create large numbers of complaints over a long period of time. In the case of the IRS, there were tons of complaints, and the White House was informed by Congressional Republicans of the complaints. The White House showed no interest. But okay, that’s a “fake” scandal in their view, fine. Although they can’t claim they didn’t know about the problem. The VA scandal is a real scandal in which whistleblowers also went to Congress, and Congressmen also went to the White House. When the story broke, Obama insisted he didn’t know about until we did. Which could be true as far as it goes, but the White House sure knew and decided it wasn’t important enough to tell him.
I just have to say that I stand in awe of Mr. adaher. Never before have I observed the skill, alacrity and swiftness such as that with which he manages to remove all doubt.
In any case, I made a joke. Just like Bush, we can mock this President for the dumb things he’s said. The only place where people have made excuses for his “I found out about it in the papers, just like you did” statements are on this board. The press corps universally didn’t buy it, because they know better. When Bush said that he didn’t read the papers and it became the subject of endless mockery, conservatives didn’t protest. As Bill Maher says, he’s your President, not your boyfriend. You don’t need to protect him from jokes.
Cite?
Addy’s convinced me, voted for Obama twice, will not do it again! Period.
Note, however, that when Ben Carson was personally spouting idiocies adaher was quick to exonerate him on the basis that it was all his staff’s fault for not handling him better.
Democrats: responsible for everything happening 47 levels down the bureaucratic ladder.
Republicans: not even responsible for things coming out of their own mouths.
That should probably be “Obama” instead of “Democrats”; adaher’s capable of being reasonable about non-Obama Democrats.
Ms. Warren complains that rusTed Cruz is whining about how running for president is so hard. Plenty of stupid to go around on this one. I mean, the guy always looks and sounds like he is whining. I bet SNL could do something with that …
I don’t know why this link is in this thread. She’s completely right.
The things that Cruz complained about are things that everyone with more than three functioning neurons understands about running for the Presidency. I would say the same thing if the person complaining about the “sacrifices” were my own preferred candidate.
The guy’s already rich. As a United States Senator he’s already incredibly powerful. And he’s running for the job of the most powerful person in the world. If there’s any job application process where you don’t get to whine about your sacrifices, this is it.
Yes, she is right. But there is no such thing as bad publicity.
From the link.
The stupid liberal idea is that Cruz gives a flying fuck about working people and that he’s capable of feeling shame.
When he’s busting Trump for whining about basically not knowing how to run a campaign, he shouldn’t be whining about how hard it is to run a campaign.
I think they should settle it the Apocalyptic Wasteland way. Chainsaws at 10 paces. Two candidates enter, one nominee leaves.
Part of one nominee leaves.